Battlefield 6 is on a rampage as its open beta attracts over 520,000 concurrent players. The game is yet to launch fully, and it’s already stomping most of the competition, Call of Duty included. Mike Ybarra, former Blizzard exec, said this is a good thing—and he’s absolutely right.
According to Ybarra, BF6 will “boot stomp CoD” in 2025, which should prompt Call of Duty to not be “lazy” anymore, in turn resulting in everyone getting better first-person shooters down the line. That might seem like a pretty straightforward take, but not everyone agreed with it. Lots of players, especially those favoring Call of Duty, disagreed with Ybarra’s message, while those on Battlefield’s side ran with it like their lives depended on it.
However, reality lies somewhere in the middle.
BF6 is the solution to a stale market
Call of Duty maintains a large player base both on PC and consoles, selling millions of copies every year and topping charts across the world every time it launches. No matter what, the CoD franchise will almost certainly never fail, and it’ll be a long, long time before we see Activision’s pride and joy roll off a cliff (if ever).
What Ybarra is implying here is that Battlefield 6, given how popular it already is, will bash heads with CoD and, potentially, steal a bit of its market share (both BO7 and BF6 launch around the same time).
Given EA and DICE’s decision to speed gameplay up a bit and lower the TTK (time-to-kill), a lot of CoD players are finding comfort in Battlefield 6, particularly its smaller-scale modes like Domination and King of the Hill, which they’ll surely find familiar. Additionally, the game completely walks back most of the decisions made in 2024, making BF6 more akin to 4 and 3 than newer entries in the series, opening it up to veterans to come back and, hopefully, stay.
It is a win-win situation for two groups of players who have gotten tired of both EA’s newer shooters and Call of Duty‘s yearly regurgitations, and the open beta numbers prove it.
What I hope ends up being true is that Battlefield 6 will maintain its popularity and dominance post-Oct. 10 when it fully launches, disturbing Activision hopefuls who believed they could just roll the same old dice again and rake in the millions. I mean, sure, they probably still will, but a few million less is certainly going to get some coats pulled, with the company rethinking how CoD can survive in this new market environment.
No competition killed CoD
CoD hasn’t had a proper competitor since Battlefield V, and even that was a lackluster release compared to its predecessor, Battlefield 1, which is by far the best Battlefield game ever made (at least, it is for me). With 2042‘s horrible launch in 2022, CoD has had free rein over the arcade shooter market, which, as we all know, saw its games get progressively worse since MW2, while Activision continues to chase trends and ludicrous partnerships.
Battlefield 6 thus stands to not only revitalize an ailing franchise, but to revamp the shooter genre as a whole, leading to both Call of Duty and Battlefield becoming bigger, better, more serious franchises with games that people actually like and love and do not whale out over.
It all depends on EA, though.
